Well, I’ll be damned. They finally won one it sounds like.

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[+] 172 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (68 children)
  • [–] 128 points 2 years ago (26 children)

    I believe that Google wanted in-app purchases in Fortnite to go through Play Store so that Google would get 30%. And Epic wanted to setup their own in-app billing and keep it all.

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  • [–] 65 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I wonder how that's going to play out with Apple and their monopoly.

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  • [–] 84 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    A lot of this case hinged on the fact that Google wasn’t treating everyone the same. They had a lot of private details for big companies.

    Unless Apple also has secret deals, then this isn’t going to impact them.

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  • [–] 34 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Apple wouldn't need to have secret deals. They're running a walled garden over there. You can't side load, and you can't run payments through the app without Apple's approval. That case was about Apple forcing developers not to even talk in the app about the possibility of making a purchase elsewhere, like through their websites. It wasn't a deal, it was Apple strong-arming a developer because they could.

    The problem is Google wanted to have what Apple has: a closed ecosystem they can exploit. But they don't have that, at least not to the same degree. Android is not "theirs", even if they've increasingly managed to make the Play Store more inseparable as time has gone by, and getting worse about that all the time.

    The most they can do is scare people away from using third party app stores or doing anything with Android they don't approve of, and when it comes to things like Play Integrity and Play Protection, they can punish you for stepping outside their bounds by breaking certain functionality (for having the audacity to want to control your own device).

    But they can't outright control anything.

    Which is where the deals come in. They're making shady deals to keep Android as their money maker and no one elses.

    It's anti-competitive, because to spite Google's efforts, there is an actual opportunity for competition on Android, where as on iPhone, there isn't.

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  • [–] 38 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    But Epic v. Google turned out to be a very different case. It hinged on secret revenue sharing deals between Google, smartphone makers, and big game developers, ones that Google execs internally believed were designed to keep rival app stores down. It showed that Google was running scared of Epic specifically. And it was all decided by a jury, unlike the Apple ruling.

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  • [+] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago*

    They obviously aren't forcing everyone to use Google billing, but it seems like an antitrust case gains a lot more ground if the accused pays money to quite a bit of people to prevent them from using competitors. That's what's getting Google here, apparently, not real forcing.

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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    On top of what Aatube says about secret unfair deals, Google's Play Store is necessary to run essential social services. In my case I need it to download my banking app and to sign into my university's online studies.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago* (4 children)

    Needing an app to sign into uni

    Jesus fucking hell. Bet it's propriety.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Need an app to configure good ol' eduroam wifi too, but that one's on F-Droid at least

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Need an app to configure good ol' eduroam wifi too

    I'm pretty sure you don't, or at least didn't, it's just much more of a hassle to configure

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  • [–] 25 points 2 years ago (21 children)

    Phone makers weren’t allowed to include other app stores by default

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  • [+] 40 points 2 years ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)
  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    What's in the contract between Google and Samsung? What exactly are the conditions for including both stores? Can any phone manufacturer get the same deal? What are the requirements for licensing Android? What number of phones on the market don't include Play Store by default? What % of applications are only in Play Store?

    Monopoly is not about exceptions but about market control. Until you know what companies have to do to use Android and function on the market you can't really tell if it's monopoly or not.

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  • I have to imagine the contract that Samsung has is "We're Samsung. We basically ARE Korean technology. We can build our own mobile OS if we want to and cut you out entirely. That's a lot of spying on customers you wouldn't get to do. We get our own app store or we walk. Oh look, LG just exited the smart phone market. Do what must be done."

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago

    “Impairment means something is there, it’s being used, it just isn’t as good. Prevented means you shut it down.”

    Epic’s expert Bernheim argues that Google’s expert Gentzkow “ignores four critical aspects of Google’s conduct,” including:

    1. Google impairs competition without preventing it entirely

    2. Google’s conduct targets comeptition as it emerges

    3. Google is dominant

    4. Google shares its Play profits with its competitors

    “When push came to shove, he talked about whether competition is prevented” rather than impaired, says Bernheim.

    The upshot of that: Bernheim believes Epic doesn’t need to prove Google actually blocked competition entirely. In his opinion (for Epic), Epic only needs to show there were no good alternatives to Google Play and Google Play Billing. It doesn’t need to show there were no alternatives at all.

    For example, says Bernheim, Gentzkow presented a chart titled “Was Fortnite Blocked?” showing that revenue tanked on Google Play after the app was kicked off the store, but didn’t tank for Android phones that got Fortnite a different way.

    But “If off-Google Play was a good substitute for Google Play, you’d see when one drops, the other goes up commensurably.” That didn’t happen: demand stayed stable outside of Play, according to the bar graph we just saw. “There’s no indication that any of the people here are substituting to off-Google Play.”

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